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Friday 5 December 2008

Deaf Sentence

The last laugh

Caroline Moore on the new novel by David Lodge

But this rather slight framework is only there to provide a peg for Lodge’s real interests. Much of the novel is taken up with Desmond’s musings upon deafness: ‘Deafness is a kind of pre-death, a drawn-out introduction to the long silence into which we will all eventually lapse’; and the many stages of auricular decay are envisaged as ‘a long staircase leading down into the grave’. Yet, as Desmond observes, ‘Deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic’ (actually, though, Mr Magoo-style near-blindness is usually comic too). Lodge’s novel brilliantly blends observational comedy with felt pain. Indignities evoke laughter, though the man that slips on a banana-skin may be crippled for life; and old age is experienced as a monstrous practical joke, nature’s version of happy- slapping.

Desmond, glimpsing Death Menu on a computer-screen at the local registry office, muses on what death one might choose if offered the carte by the Angel of Death — ‘something painless, dignified (no bed-pans and catheters)…’ Certainly, one would not pick a comic Special. (Jo Grimond once confessed to my father-in-law that he had been unable to attend the funeral of a relation for fear of laughing: the dead man had been run over while Morris dancing.)

All these reflections on the cruelties of comedy and the compensations of tragedy, however interesting, might have come across as a mere extended essay if Lodge had not also explored these themes through his characters — particularly through the relationship between Desmond and his wife, Fred, which is well-drawn, and through the relationship between Desmond and his father, which is one of the most moving things I have read in a long while. Deaf Sentence kick-starts into imaginative and emotional life whenever Desmond’s stubborn, exasperating, pitiful and admirable father comes on the scene, and Lodge’s pitch-perfect writing superbly dodges both mawkishness and mere cleverness.

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